Who are the people you deal with to buy a house in Massachusetts?

Front steps of a shingled North Shore two-family house with a moving box and a folder of papers by the door
Who to have on your house buying team in Massachusetts

Seven people, and two of them are not professionals

Written by: John Donlon

Reviewed by: Matt Teeter

Who Are the People You Deal With When Buying a Home in Massachusetts?

The short answer

There are seven people on a Massachusetts home buying team. A homebuyer class instructor, a loan officer, a buyer’s agent, a real estate attorney, a home inspector, an advocate, and you. Five of those roles can be filled by almost anyone competent. Two of them are yours alone, and those are the two nobody else puts on the list.

Nobody wins this on their own. Even in sports without teams, a top swimmer or a marathon runner has a team behind them. Home buying on the North Shore has turned into a competitive event, and the people around you decide how it goes.

I’m John Donlon, and real estate has been in my blood since childhood. I used savings from my paper route to buy my first property in my early twenties, a three-family at 11 Munroe Street in Beverly. Next was a four-family on Cross Street in Salem. By my late twenties I sold that portfolio to fund a mortgage company that is now among the 70 earliest licensed mortgage companies in the country.

John walks through all seven.

Why assemble the team early?

You can buy a house with fewer than seven people. Plenty do. The project turns reactionary.

Reactionary is the opposite of leading on your own terms. I see it both ways, every day. Reactionary costs more, it leads to mistakes, and it contorts what you wanted in the first place. Proactive means you run this project like a boss, with advocates on your shoulder who protect your mission. Good ones will even protect you from yourself, by reeling you in on your blind spots and on the shiny objects you’ll meet along the way.

Think of it like a wedding. If your caterer, your band, your bartender, your cake maker and your photographer are all meeting for the first time at a venue none of them has seen, there’s going to be a learning curve, and your day pays for it. Assemble your home buying team in advance, and make the introductions months before game day. It’s a different experience. You usually end up in a better house, too.

Illustration of a dining table set for seven, with a place card at each seat: Class instructor, Loan officer, Buyer's agent, Attorney, Inspector, and amber cards for Your advocate and Yourself. Headline: Seven seats, filled early.

📝 Table of Contents

1. The Homebuyer Class Instructor: Your Ticket In

Your first helper is the teacher or agency you take your first-time homebuyer class from. You need the certificate to use the programs that carry real first-time buyer incentives, and in Massachusetts that means MassHousing and the ONE Mortgage. On the conventional side, Fannie Mae’s HomeReady requires homeownership education for first-time borrowers. Freddie Mac’s Home Possible asks for it too when every borrower on the loan is a first-time buyer.

The certificate is good for two years. You don’t need it before you start your journey, but it’s the ticket that gets you into the arena.

The class won’t sort out your qualification, your budget or your credit profile. That’s a separate conversation, and you’ll want to have it. Don’t worry about forgetting this step. We’ll remind you.

2. The Loan Officer: Your First Call

Since you aren’t paying cash, you need a money person, and a mortgage solution lined up in advance. That usually takes the form of a pre-qualification, or a full TBD underwrite, which is the whole approval process run before you’ve got a property address.

Your licensed loan officer might work for a bank or a credit union. They might be part of a team working for a mortgage broker. Either way, you need real confidence in this person. When your search heats up to the point of live offers, you’ll be talking to your loan officer constantly, nights and weekends included.

Unlike a bank that only offers its own products, a mortgage broker shops your loan across many lenders to find the rate and program that fit your file. You can browse the North Shore Chamber Directory for local options. For a common sense approach, we recommend:

John Donlon – GoldCoast Mortgage
John specializes in helping buyers structure deals that maximize affordability on the North Shore.
Email: JDonlon@GoldCoastMortgage.com | Phone: (978) 922-4446

I’m biased, obviously, and we’re not for everyone. We also only work with clients buying in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine. But choose the wrong loan officer and you’ll spend months wondering why your offers are never acknowledged.

Two more people sit behind this one, and you’ll probably never speak to either. The appraiser is hired to verify the home’s value. The underwriter is the final decision maker who reviews your credit, income and assets and issues the clear to close. Your loan officer is the person who manages both of them on your behalf, which is another reason the choice matters.

Once you have a price range, run it through our closing cost calculator. The down payment is only part of the cash you’ll need on closing day, and that’s the number buyers most often underestimate. Every calculator we offer is on the mortgage calculators page.

3. The Buyer’s Agent: Your Strategic Guide

Not the agent whose name is on the sign in the yard. That one works for the seller. A buyer’s agent works for you.

One thing has changed here, and a lot of advice online hasn’t caught up. Buyer’s agents used to be described as free, because the seller’s side covered the fee. Since August 2024 that’s no longer how it works. You sign a written buyer agency agreement setting your agent’s compensation before they tour a home with you. The fee is negotiable, it’s never set by law, and it’s your obligation unless the seller agrees to contribute. Sellers still contribute in plenty of deals, but the MLS no longer advertises if they will, so it has to be asked for directly. Read that agreement before you sign it, and treat the number in it as a real cost in your budget.

Your buyer’s agent has to understand the strategy and be good at their job. If they aren’t, and there are plenty who aren’t, their communication with the listing agent will be difficult. If you think there’s no behind the scenes favoritism about which offers get taken seriously and where they come from, that would be naive.

While you can search via the Massachusetts Association of Realtors, we highly recommend these local experts:

4. The Real Estate Attorney: Your Legal Safeguard

You don’t need your own attorney to buy a house. Many people buy without legal representation, though not our clients. There will be an attorney involved regardless, because someone has to do the bank’s title work and handle the money on closing day.

Often you can hire that same attorney to represent your interests as well, for very little money.

Massachusetts is an attorney-required closing state, but that requirement belongs to the bank, not to you. In New Hampshire a non-attorney can close the loan for the lender, a title agent or a notary from a title examiner’s office, for example. Even then, you would still want an attorney representing your side.

Isn’t hiring the bank’s attorney a conflict of interest?

Buyers ask if hiring the bank’s attorney to also represent them is a conflict of interest. It isn’t. The bank’s interests and yours are two cookies from the same cutter. You want a house free of liens, title problems and defects. So does the bank, because it is their collateral. They want the proper parties paid so nobody ends up having bought the Brooklyn Bridge. They want the former occupants gone and the place broom clean. So do you. If you need an attorney to protect you from the terms of your own mortgage, you chose the wrong loan officer.

One useful detail: if you piggyback the bank’s title work with the attorney representing you, that is fewer chefs in the kitchen and you get a break on some of the fees. GoldCoast keeps no restricted list of closing attorneys, which most banks do. If you already have an attorney representing you, we will most likely ask the lender to use that same attorney for the title work and the closing. Your attorney will thank you, because they earn the additional fees.

You can search Justia for a list of attorneys, but these three are highly recommended:

  • Matt Shoemaker (Sulloway & Hollis): Licensed in MA, NH and ME. Ideal for multi-state searches.
    Email: mshoemaker@sulloway.com
  • John “Jack” O’Keefe (DLG): Massachusetts-only specialist with deep local experience.
    Phone: (978) 423-6285
  • Bridget Condike (Tempus Fugit Law): Massachusetts real estate closings.

5. The Home Inspector: Your Reality Check

Your inspector is your eyes and ears on the physical condition of the property, from the foundation of a historic Salem home to a radon test.

The Massachusetts rules here changed on October 15, 2025, and this is the part most buyers still have backwards. You’ll read that you can waive the inspection contingency to make your offer look stronger. Under the new regulation, 760 CMR 74.00, you can’t use it that way anymore. A seller cannot demand a waiver. They cannot advertise that they will only consider offers that include one, and they cannot accept an offer with the waiver written into it from the outset. A buyer may still waive an inspection, but only after the offer has been accepted and after receiving the mandatory written disclosure. So waiving is no longer a competitive lever. It’s something you can choose later, for your own reasons.

Illustration of a path to a house with signs: Make your offer, Seller accepts, then an amber sign reading Inspect, or choose to waive, tagged Written disclosure first. A crossed-out sign reads Waiver in the offer. Headline: No waiver inside your offer.

What is an informational-only inspection?

You also have the option of doing an inspection for informational purposes only. You can still walk away if the house is falling off its foundation, but you’re signaling to the seller that you don’t intend to reopen the price afterward. You declare yourself a take it or leave it buyer.

It’s worth understanding what the inspection looks like from the seller’s side. Once your offer is accepted, you have a window to inspect. If the deal blows up because of what the inspection finds, which I maintain is a good outcome because it means you did not buy a house with undisclosed problems, the seller now waits for the home to be relisted. That can delay their sale, and their cash, by weeks. Never forget that selling a home always solves a problem for somebody. Your inspection is a potential delay to their solution.

Even if you plan to waive later, get an inspector through the door at a private showing, looking only for the fifty thousand dollar problems, or whatever your own pain threshold happens to be.

6. The Advocate: The One Nobody Lists

This one hasn’t made it onto any other list, and it might be the one that changes your outcome most.

You need an advocate. It could be a co-worker who bought a home a year ahead of you. It could be your aunt who has been a landlord for thirty-five years. It could be anyone who has already been through it and is willing to tell you the truth about it.

They say that if you can learn your lessons from someone else’s failures, you’ll be unstoppable. That’s true here. You don’t need to lose a deposit yourself to understand how an earnest money deposit works. If you have someone who can teach you why assets appreciate, and why inflation works in your favor once you own rather than rent, you don’t have to spend a decade waiting to learn it the expensive way.

Find a real estate mentor, or someone who believes you will cut the line in life by owning earlier instead of paying a landlord longer.

7. Yourself: The One That Decides It

I’m not trying to state the obvious. You are the largest part of your own team, and some shoppers aren’t ready to own. Usually nobody knows that, including them.

Two from the archives.

I have buyers in Watertown with a sweetheart deal on a good apartment, well under market at $2,200. They half know it, but they haven’t been back into the rental market, so they don’t know how competitive it’s become. Every home they look at doubles their housing cost, and they retreat to the safety of their lease. They will circle the airport forever before landing. It will take the sale of their building, and a new lease at $3,800, before they are ready to commit to a mortgage payment.

I finished a five-year journey with another buyer. Something was wrong with every single house. The price, the condition, the location. Forty-two qualification letters went out with their offers. None stuck. Then their landlord decided to sell the apartment.

If you come to this wanting it, you’ll buy a home. If you come tentatively, it isn’t going to happen until you go all in.

We call that your WHY. Without a personal why, you’ll crumble under pressure and retreat to your parents’ place or sign another lease. Every deal is hard. I compare it to climbing a steep mountain where you keep hitting a false summit. We have a whole strategy for defining your why in advance, and it’s what keeps them on track.

Print the checklist.

All seven seats on one page, in the order they go to work, with room to write in names and your WHY.

Download the home buying team checklist (PDF)

Where to Buy: Every Town in Essex County

Once your team is assembled, you can focus your search. Essex County ranges from urban centers to rural farmland. Here is the full list of cities and towns where your team can help you find a home:

Frequently Asked Questions

Why talk to a loan officer before an agent?
An agent can show you any house. A loan officer tells you which ones you can close on. Knowing your comfortable monthly payment stops you falling in love with a home that was never going to work.

Do I need my own attorney if the lender already has one?
You aren’t required to have one. Many buyers hire the bank’s closing attorney to represent them as well, which costs little and often reduces the total fees. What you shouldn’t do is assume the bank’s attorney is looking after your interests by default.

Is a buyer’s agent still free?
No, and that’s the biggest change in years. Since August 2024 you sign a written agreement setting your agent’s fee before they tour a home with you. Sellers can still contribute, and many do, but it has to be negotiated rather than assumed.

Can I waive the home inspection to win a bidding war?
Not as of October 15, 2025. A seller cannot require a waiver or accept an offer that includes one up front. You can still choose to waive after your offer is accepted, once you have received the required written disclosure.

How long is my homebuyer class certificate good for?
Two years from the day you complete the class.

Start Building Your Team Today

Ready to get your numbers straight so you can start shopping in Essex County with confidence? Reach out to John Donlon at GoldCoast Mortgage. No pressure and no cost, and if the honest answer is wait a year, that’s the answer you’ll get. We’ll help you find the right path and connect you with the best agents and attorneys on the North Shore.

Phone: (978) 922-4446 | Email: JDonlon@GoldCoastMortgage.com